// Towards Data Science · 29 May 2026

RAG Is Burning Money — I Built a Cost Control Layer to Fix It

Most RAG systems are optimized for answer quality, not cost—and that blind spot gets expensive fast. In this article, I break down a production-ready cost control layer combining semantic caching, query routing, token budgeting, and circuit breaking, achieving an 85% reduction in LLM costs without s...

Towards Data Science

@towards-data-science · Emmimal P Alexander

towardsdatascience.com

Towards Data Science@towards-data-science